How to measure brand awareness to prove your ROI

So how do you measure your brand’s awareness while trying to justify your business’ budget with ROI (Return on Investment)?

It is incredibly difficult to connect an investment in brand awareness to your business revenue. Learning how to measure you brand awareness is key to proving the ROI of brand equity.

Firstly, you need to be able to measure your brand awareness with the right metrics before proving how they are contributing to your market revenue. With this in mind you can then improve upon your business’ marketing activities and justify your marketing decision to stakeholders.

Key metrics to measure brand awareness

Let’s start simple:

Direct traffic to your website

This comes from users who typed your website or link directly into their browser which in turn directs them straight to your website. This relies on users remembering your URL for your specific brand. In the marketing industry this is known as brand recall and is what makes up brand awareness. Direct traffic is good metric to keep an eye on in order to measure the impact of recall on your audience. You can do this using Google Analytics or any other analytic software that your website has.

Earned media

Earned media is when your company has found its way into the press through an article about your business. Earned media will help to boost brand awareness. There are various platforms which you can measure this on, including platforms such as Trackmavern where you are given an idea of the number of shares the article has had and the earned media efforts are reaching.

External Links

Building links in your website is an important part of improving your website’s overall SEO. This in turn can help to improve your company’s search ranking, reach new audiences and contribute to conversions. This is something which can be tracked in Google Analytics as well as TrackMavern. External links are so important when it comes to brand awareness as it improves the visibility of your website and your offerings as a business. In Google Analytics, this is what is known as referral traffic and can be measured accordingly.

Blog shares

Having a blog on your website can do wonders for your organic brand awareness. A share bar on your blogs allows readers to share your content on various social networks, spreading awareness about your content and brand through social media. You can measure the number of shares your blogs have and keep an eye on how they are helping to build a community around your business.

Social engagement

Social engagement is all about being able to measure your brand awareness through the use of social media. This is something you can track on Facebook and Instagram as well as other social platforms. With their integrated analytics, you can track how people are engaging with your business. This in turn will show you how your brand is reaching your community amplifying your brand awareness.

Community reach

Your business’ community growth is another metric for measuring your brand’s awareness on social. On each of the social media platforms you can track the amount of follows, likes and shares and measure the changes over time.

Search volume

Using Google Adwords or another search ranking platform, you can track the number of searches for your brand’s name, variations of the name, products, blog, anything that might indicate brand awareness. One of the main sources of organic traffic is through these types of searches. If people are searching for your company, it is a good indicator of brand awareness.

Using Google Analytics, you can set yourself goals to measure any action users have taken on your website. You can also track the e-commerce activities of your website if this is relevant to your business, this includes cart activity and number of purchases. Creating goals which track conversions from visitors to your website will allow you to demonstrate ROI of brand recall using your direct traffic indicator.

Track goals from referral traffic

Similar to tracking goals for direct traffic you can also track your referral traffic. Measuring the impact of referral traffic on business outcomes helps you to prove the ROI on your business from earned media as other external links. Platforms such as Google Analytics will allow you to drill down your direct traffic to find out which external links and websites are sending you qualified leads.

Social Engagement tracking

By using platforms such as Google Analytics and TrackMavern you can show just how individual posts are contributing to customer conversions and purchases.